A Red Hat invasion officially began in Boston, Mass. on Tuesday with a series of keynote addresses and announcements ranging from enhancements to Red Hat OpenShift AI to the launch of Ansible Lightspeed, the next phase of the Project Wisdom initiative.
Known as Red Hat Summit, the annual conference combines a mix of the technical with a deep business perspective, and for the first time is running simultaneously with Ansible Fest, also an annual event that focuses on the company’s open-source IT automation tool and brings together users, contributors, and developers.
The major news on the Red Hat OpenShift AI front, the company’s AI and machine learning operations (MLOps) platform, was that it now contains the following enhancements:
- Development pipelines for AI/ML experiment tracking and automated ML workflows, which the company said, “helps data scientists and intelligent application developers to more quickly iterate on machine learning projects and build automation into application deployment and updates.”
- Bias detection (available in the coming months) that enables organizations to detect bias during training before they reach production, and continuously monitors deployed production models for changes in measured bias.
- The ability for organizations to manage performance and operational metrics from a centralized dashboard.
The platform, a release stated, provides a “consistent, scalable foundation based on open-source technology for IT operations leaders while bringing a specialized partner ecosystem to data scientists and developers to capture innovation in AI.
“To that end, Red Hat OpenShift AI underpins the generative AI services of IBM watsonx.ai, IBM’s artificial intelligence platform designed to scale intelligent applications and services across all aspects of the enterprise, fueling the next generation of foundation models.”
According to Red Hat, as Large Language Models (LLMs) such as OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Meta’s LLaMA become mainstream, researchers and application developers “across all domains and industries are exploring ways to benefit from these, and other foundation models. Customers can fine tune commercial or open-source models with domain-specific data to make them more accurate to their specific use cases.”
The initial training of AI models, it added, is “incredibly infrastructure intensive, requiring specialized platforms and tools even before serving, tuning and model management are taken into consideration. Without a platform that can meet these demands, organizations are often limited in how they can use AI/ML.”
What ends up happening behind the scenes in terms of development is paramount if the true potential of generative AI is to be achieved, two senior executives with the firm maintain.
In a keynote speech, Red Hat CEO Matt Hicks said that just like open source, the advent of the internet and the launch of edge computing became “moments in time” embraced by millions who saw the potential of each and acted, the same now applies to AI.
“We are in one of those moments, right now,” said Hicks. “It’s the Moment of AI. AI has moved from the obscurity of academia to the ubiquity of ChatGPT. We are watching the impact and potential of open source that played out all those years ago with operating systems and programming language now playing out with AI.
“We are watching creativity on a global scale make its way into artificial intelligence through an open source revolution. It’s the time to dream about the potential for your business, your industry, and to be the driver of change for the better.“
As for Ansible Lightspeed, Red Hat said the next phase of Project Wisdom involves bringing in intelligent natural language processing capability for Ansible automation. The new service, the company said, is designed to help “drive consistent and accurate automation adoption across an organization, making it easier for novice users to automate tasks, while removing the burden of low-level task creation from experienced automators.”
Ashesh Badani, senior vice president and chief product officer with Red Hat, said “innovation has been and always will be a human-centric story. It starts with the right idea, flourishes with the right team, and reaches its full potential with the right tools.
“That’s what we’re doing with Ansible Lightspeed: giving people a capable technology that’s intelligent, yet understandable enough for developers and operators to use automation in new ways and for users to employ their existing knowledge so that a vision can come to life.”
Project Wisdom is a Red Hat initiative developed in collaboration with IBM Research to infuse Ansible with a set of unique AI capabilities.